RECENT WRITERS to The Chronicle commenting on the origins of indiscriminate aerial bombing of civilians have not delved deeply enough into early aeronautical history and have labeled as "indiscriminate" some bombing efforts that were not intended to be.

There is fragmentary evidence that attempts to drop explosives on cities by means of kites were made in Europe in A.D. 1326 and in Siam in 1690. The first definitely known aerial bombardment of an urban area, however, occurred during the 1848-1849 Austrian siege of Venice, when the besiegers lofted a number of hot-air, free-floating balloons carrying small explosive charges fitted with devices to release them over the city. This was certainly "indiscriminate," for the Austrians could have had no idea of where air currents would carry the balloons.

The next example occurred in 1912 during the First Balkan War, when a Bulgarian airplane strewed a few crude bombs haphazardly on the Turkish city of Adrianople (now called Edirne). This, again, was certainly "indiscriminate," for the aviator could have had no knowledge of what his missiles would hit.

The most recent commentator to The Chronicle cites, on the authority of Barbara Tuchman, the German Zeppelin bombing of Liege, Belgium, in 1914, as the first instance of "indiscriminate bombing" of civilians. With all due respect to Tuchman, that superb historian was in this case dead wrong. She misidentified the airship, attributed to it a greater number of bombs than it carried and misunderstood its mission -- which was not to bomb the city but the forts surrounding it. That it failed, and killed civilians instead, was because aerial bombing techniques were still so rudimentary.

Likewise, the German airship attacks on British cities during World War I were not deliberately indiscriminate. The intent was to hit what were conceived as legitimate military or economic objectives -- arsenals, munitions plants, railroad depots, governmental offices and the like. The bombs instead often fell far from these targets because of faulty aerial navigation.

Ultimately, it is impossible to determine who was first guilty of indiscriminate aerial bombing of civilians; the guilt is collective. Destruction of cities and their occupants has become, pious words to the contrary notwithstanding, a prime tenet of "air power" doctrine, which I believe is the most perverse and outright evil philosophy of war ever devised.